Fans on both sides could easily argue that there has been some below-the-belt play through two games of the best-of-seven playoff series between the Minnesota Wild and Dallas Stars, though there only appears to be one team trying to bend the rules to earn extra power plays.
Evason’s comment came after being asked about Dallas coach Pete DeBoer saying he’s “not surprised” that Minnesota has taken 16 penalties in two games. DeBoer isn’t wrong. The Wild were the sixth-most penalized team in the NHL this season.
“We watch all the press conferences, too,” said Evason, with a smile on his face, then suggesting that Dallas has taken dives in an attempt to draw penalties. Taking dives, for the record, goes down as an embellishment penalty if the refs see it as such.
“We felt that they had some bigger people probably go down pretty easy in that hockey game,” Evason said after Game 2. “It’s a fine line because we don’t dive. The Minnesota Wild don’t dive. There’s so many times I’d love to go in there and go, ‘You know what, guys? Let’s embellish.’ We want to draw penalties because of how hard we’re working and how gritty we are.”
Embellishment or not, the Wild need to be better on the penalty kill. They have allowed five power-play goals on 11 penalty kills this series.
Evason also implied that he wants penalties called on the Stars for cheap shots, namely the cross checks that Ryan Suter has delivered to Kirill Kaprizov’s back.
‘We’ve talked about this before, Kirill, he takes a lot of abuse and he doesn’t go down very often,” Evason said. “He probably got hurt (against Winnipeg on March 8) because of it. We don’t do that. That’s not what we do.”
The play that Dallas can point to as borderline dirty was Matt Dumba’s hit that knocked Joe Pavelski out of Game 1. Dumba was assessed a minor roughing penalty while Pavelski didn’t return to Game 1, missed Game 2 and didn’t travel with the Stars to St. Paul for Games 3 and 4.
Game 3 is scheduled to begin at 8:50 p.m. CT Friday.
